Put The Infrastructure Bill On "The Back Burner" In Order To Get An Unadulterated "Win" On The Voting Rights Bill First. (THEN, Return To The Infrastructure Bill)
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Some close allies worry that President Joe Biden isn’t pushing hard enough on voting rights. Then: A former Defense Department employee recalls what it was like to work for Colin Powell, who died today. https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-way-forward-for-bidens-legislative.html |
On Voting Rights |
This past July, after the Supreme Court voted 6–3 to further gut the 1965 Voting Rights Act, my colleague Ronald Brownstein warned that only one way was left to protect the right to cast a ballot in America: through national legislation.
Now, three months later, no such bill has yet made its way to the president’s desk despite the White House’s insistence that voting rights are a priority. Advocates and allies on the left fear that the GOP’s recent assault on suffrage at the state level will go unchecked.
Some worry that Biden isn’t doing enough. “I think the Biden administration’s more immediate priority is these infrastructure bills,” Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, told my colleague Peter Nicholas. “And I really think that [voting rights] need to be pursued with equal vigor.”
The Freedom to Vote Act is a “stellar” compromise bill. Norm Ornstein and Dennis Aftergut argue that the legislation could be the corrective that American democracy needs. (And it notably has the support of two crucial moderate Democrats in the Senate.)
But even that bill can’t pass while the filibuster survives. The infamous Senate rule has been getting in the way of a lot of Biden’s agenda, Ron points out.
Elsewhere, Democratic-led attempts to end gerrymandering could backfire. By pushing to make redistricting nonpartisan the party may have inadvertently ceded ground to the GOP, Russell Berman reports. That decision could doom Democrats for the next decade.
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